Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 3.0/2.0 Ultra Portable External Hard Drive (Silver)

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One terabyte that fits in your jeans' pocket. I don't want to go all "when we were young we walked 10 miles to school, etc." on you, but my first hard drive was such that I would have needed 50'000 of 'em to match the capacity, occupying a solid cube 9 feet on each side and setting me back 30 million dollars. That's mind- blowing progress indeed, and while the original advances were made by firms like Seagate and IBM, those have mostly sold off/sourced out in the meantime, leaving Western Digital as the Bleeding Edge hard drive brand.

This device looks like a cigarette holder with a glossy finish. The edges are rounded, and the usb connector is the only opening in the case, so for my occasional transport I just carry the drive in my jacket as-is. It would have been super- neat to have a rubber flap over the usb and perhaps a more scratch- resistant matte finish, but there is no issue here, especially since WD offers inexpensive... Read more

First Impressions Review:

This is the first time I have ever used a portable (tiny) external hard drive. I currently use a Cavalry dual disk external drive in RAID configuration which is huge and not really portable.

This new WD drive is fantastic in that it is quite small, doesn't require external power, and it is quite good looking. It is amazing how they fit 1 TB drive in such a small package. One bonus is that when I replace my computer in future with one that has USB 3.0 interface, this drive can handle that. (It works fine with USB 2.0 also.) The device looked and felt solid.

The USB port that is on the drive seems to be proprietary, but it could be a standard port for USB 3.0. The cable that comes with the drive fits snugly and works well. The cable should be saved carefully - I don't have any other cable with that specialized connector.

The backup software resides on the hard disk of the drive. I didn't bother installing that... Read more

I can remember when I was impressed by a 356 MB hard drive on my new computer. (Remember those days?) Now here's this back-up external drive that is a terabyte, something that not so many years ago was in the domain only of supercomputers that took up whole rooms. The really impressive thing is that this is such a nice compact little drive, not much bigger than a deck of playing cards. I've used other drives for back up and have always avoided the back up software that came with some of them, fearing it would get in the way and slow things down when I'm working or that it would take too much time to figure out what to back up and how often to do so. As a result, I often forget to back things up, which could be a disaster if I ever had a hard drive failure.

Now the nice thing about a large external drive such as this one is that it has tons of space and I can just back up everything and keep several copies. The software that comes on the drive installs in minutes and... Read more